Pierluigi Paganini January 25, 2017

The TorWorld initiative aims to build a community area for those people that desire to set up either a Tor Relay or a Tor Exit node.

We all recognize the importance of the Tor network, an important instrument to protect users’ anonymity and avoid censorship. Today I desire to present you an interesting initiative launched by Tor passionates, the TorWorld, belonging to the CryptoWorld Foundation.

The CryptoWorld Foundation groups several organizations that provide anonymity services. The TorWorld aims to build a community area for those people that desire to set up either a Tor Relay or a Tor Exit node.

According to Bleepingcomputer.com, the project born out of a real necessity:

“The idea for ‘TorWorld’ came about four months ago,” Beard, one of TorWorld’s founding members told Bleeping Computer.

“We originally ran a few Guard Relays for a little over a year privately,” Beard continued. “After we had an issue with our Guard nodes being removed by our ISP at the time because of a misunderstanding, we thought about possibly setting up a service dedicated to running Tor nodes, and educating people on Tor.”

“Eventually we started that [idea], and at first we looked for automation scripts to make it easier for us to deploy multiple Tor servers in a fast and dynamic way,” Beard said. “To our surprise, we couldn’t find a single script.”

The team at the TorWorld published scripts simplify the set up of a Tor node, including Bash scripts for quickly deploying Tor guard (entry) nodes, Tor relay (middle) servers, Tor bridges (unlisted relays), and Tor exit nodes.

The project is ambitious and we can only wish the team great success, representatives from the TorWorld confirmed that the intention of the team to become a hosting provider for Tor servers and they are thinking to a sort of Tor-as-a-Service (TaaS).

Beard explained that the final goal it to allow users to create a Tor nodes on top of TorWorld’s server infrastructure in a single click thanks to a set of open-sourced Bash scripts.

This is an important step, unfortunately, today the set up of a Tor node is not a simple operation for everyone despite it is very well documented on the official Tor Project website.

“We’ll be adding more dynamic customization options for the FastRelay, and FastExit scripts,” Beard added.

TorWorld will also offer a platform to manage abuse notices for Tor servers operated by its users. It will be a paid service because a TorWorld team will handle their abuse notifications.

We all know that darknets represent a facilitator and aggregator for cyber criminal communities and the Tor network is one of the most popular anonymizing netwotk in the criminal underground.

The TorWorld will not allow criminal uses of its infrastructure.

Currently, there is no certainty about when and how the TorWorld TaaS service will be ready, anyway I’ll monitor its progress with a great interest and admiration.

[adrotate banner=”9″]

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – TorWorld, Tor)